Few days ago I wrote about testing writing to many files and seeing how this affects sequential read performance. I was very interested to see how it shows itself with real tables so I’ve got the script and ran tests for MyISAM and Innodb tables on ext3 filesystem. Here is what I found:
Redundant index is not always bad
August 28, 2007 By 7 Comments
About year ago Peter wrote about redundant indexes and mentioned sometimes it is good to leave two indexes, even one is first part of another. I’m speaking about BTREE indexes, for example, KEY (A), and KEY (A,B). From SQL point of view KEY(A) is not needed, as for queries like WHERE A=5 the index (A,B) [...]
MySQL and PostgreSQL SpecJAppServer benchmark results
July 25, 2007 By 13 Comments
Listening to Josh Berkus presentation on OSCON today I decided to take a closer look at SpecJAppServer benchmarks results which were published by PostgreSQL recently and which as Josh Puts it “This publication shows that a properly tuned PostgreSQL is not only as fast or faster than MySQL, but almost as fast as Oracle (since [...]
MySQL Slow query log in the table
May 31, 2007 By 1 Comment
As of MySQL 5.1 get MySQL slow query log logged in mysql.slow_log table instead of the file as you had in previous versions. We rarely would use this feature as it is incompatible with our slow query analyses patch and tools Fixing this is not trivial while staying 100% compatible to standard format as TIME [...]
To UUID or not to UUID ?
March 13, 2007 By 28 Comments
Brian recently posted an article comparing UUID and auto_increment primary keys, basically advertising to use UUID instead of primary keys. I wanted to clarify this a bit as I’ve seen it being problems in so many cases. First lets look at the benchmark – we do not have full schema specified in the article itself [...]
Performance impact of complex queries
January 17, 2007 By 11 Comments
What is often underestimated is impact of MySQL Performance by complex queries on large data sets(ie some large aggregate queries) and batch jobs. It is not rare to see queries which were taking milliseconds to stall for few seconds, especially in certain OS configurations, and on low profile servers (ie having only one disk drive) [...]
Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables
October 3, 2006 By 8 Comments
I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]
Cache Performance Comparison
August 9, 2006 By 74 Comments
Jay Pipes continues cache experiements and has compared performance of MySQL Query Cache and File Cache. Jay uses Apache Benchmark to compare full full stack, cached or not which is realistic but could draw missleading picture as contribution of different components may be different depending on your unique applications. For example for application containing a [...]
Using MyISAM in production
June 17, 2006 By 36 Comments
There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production. For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it [...]
MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.
June 8, 2006 By 14 Comments
MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]
